Thursday, April 22, 2004

In the mail So, just about eight months to the day since I finished PBP, look what came in the mail. In reading the lore of the ride over the years, I'd seen reports of the medal, complete with your own individual time on it. For some reason, I thought it might show up by the end of last year. But it never came, and lots of other stuff came up, and I never really thought too much about it. I just figured that maybe I was the one rider who didn't get one; or that my ride had been declared invalid for some unworthiness that the organizers had detected in me; or that I had managed to ride the one year when no medals were awarded. Just my luck. Then I started to see accounts on some cycling email lists a month or so ago that none of the American riders had gotten their medals yet. But they were coming. By sea mail, maybe. Yesterday, a big brown envelope with my self-addressed sticker was in the mailbox. Heavy. The medal was inside, along with my brevet card, with the stamps from all the controls along the way, and the English-language program for the event, with the finish times for all the participants, including No. 4417, Dan Brekke: 85H51. 10:01:21 PM    comment []

Resettling the Plains Spotted a feature somewhere in the past couple of weeks about how some Plains towns are offering homesteads to residents. It's a twist on the old homestead idea: Instead of 160 acres and five years to "prove out" your claim  by farming it, you get something less than an acre in town and need to build on it in a year or so. After seeing the National Geographic article, I checked and found the story; it was in the Washington Post. As an aside: What's with the fascination of the eastern papers -- The New York Times has been running a series of in-depth features on the depopulation of the Plains for at least a couple of years -- with the Plains? 9:38:16 PM    comment []

Great Plains Cover story in the May National Geographic: 'The Great Plains: Change of Heartland.' Focuses on the un-settlement of the Plains and the (supposed) comeback of the buffalo and Native Americans. Yeah, at this point you have to get the magazine for the full story, which is beautifully shot. But the online tease for the story contains one stunning picture that's representative of the powerful pictures in the magazine. 11:36:09 AM    comment []

My current data crush Wikipedia: "...an open-content encyclopedia in many languages. ... started in January 2001 ... 251,571 articles in the English version." For one of the features on our show, "TechLive," I check its daily almanac of historical events (here's today's). Pretty amazing what a bunch of smart volunteers can do. 10:13:12 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2004 Dan Brekke.